Friday 22^nd July – Mirina, Limnos, Greece

39:52.419N 25:03.461E

Having had an almost sleepless night, this morning we waved goodbye to Zephyr and Juella as they set off on their travels in different directions. 

There were a few yachts departing from the town quay and the two charter boats rafted out on the boat behind us moved out – one onto the quay and the one that had hit us reversed around the bay to anchor.  So we pointed out to the small Bulgarian yacht that it would now be possible for them to move to the quay and no longer be hanging onto us.  They were reluctant to move at first; they wouldn’t go to the quay but moved along to raft onto the tug boat behind us which was a bit weird.  Still, it meant Pyxis would no longer have to suffer muddy boots across her deck.  When our fishermen hosts arrived we managed in sign language to ‘teflon’ the blame for the mess on their deck and they passed us their hose so that we could clean ourselves off too.

A little later we noticed the charter yacht dragging on its anchor out of the harbour; fortunately they finally spotted it and then went on the quay for a while before departing late morning now having sorted out their problem.

Unfortunately, this afternoon our fishermen friends needed to fire up their engine which promptly spewed rusty soot from the exhaust all over us again.  The guys were really sorry and immediately turned on the hose and sprayed us down – we tried to ask them to wait until they were finished with the engine so we could brush it off but it was difficult with not speaking Greek (we tried with our phrase book but our pronunciation was obviously rubbish) and we didn’t want to try too hard and offend them, so we have a few more orange marks to remove.  Afterwards I passed round the beers to prove we were not cross with them (the international currency of friendship).

This evening we went out to dinner and treated ourselves to a lovely meal ashore with a view of the harbour (and Pyxis).

Richard has had a cold developing for a day or two now that has the exact same symptoms as the cold I caught in Istanbul and suffered in Yalova; I am really quite curious as to whether or not a cold can incubate for so long before developing – the symptoms are just too similar to be a coincidence.